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When you are a brand new occupational therapist who serves five different schools within a school district and needs supplies for which there is no budget, what do you do? You might do what Kate Hartnett, MSOT ’15 did: choose an online fundraising site, put your story and needs out there and get the donations needed to equip yourself with supplies to help your students with special needs live life to the fullest.
Working for the Henderson (NC) County Public Schools in three elementary, one middle and one high school, Hartnett notes that while her students are a diverse group of individuals with unique needs and abilities, all of them have
the potential to enjoy meaningful activities and benefit from occupational therapy to meet their educational needs. “They face challenges throughout their day which can impede their learning… I work with a diverse group of children who are diagnosed with disabilities ranging from autism, to Duchenne’s, Prader Willi, Osteogenesis Imperfecta, and Down Syndrome, as well as social-emotional disabilities…my goal is to facilitate their educational process through sensory integration.”
Kate Hartnett, winner of the 2014-2015 Thomas L. Lewis Leadership Excellence Scholarship and recipient of the 2015 American Occupational Therapy Foundation Alice Jantzen Memorial Scholarship, is now a committed therapist whose ingenuity provided her with the equipment necessary to teach her students to be their best.
